Your lack of fortune is in the cards

Something that often comes up, in discussions about providing financial aid for those on low incomes, is the idea of a “payment card“.

Rather than handing out cash, this would be something that looks and acts rather like a credit card, which is topped up every so often with a fixed amount of credit, but which can only be used to purchase a limited set of goods. Food and other essentials, for instance, but not booze and cigarettes and other things that simple cash money might be frittered away on.

This may, at first, seem like a worthwhile way to make sure that those we’re trying to help are actually being helped; that, if some people have naturally unreliable spending habits which have led them to a situation where they need help, those habits can be curbed by not giving them the chance to spend their funds unwisely.

It’s understandable if such a scheme doesn’t immediately strike you as unconscionably heartless, cruel, and dehumanising.

But it’s an idea that’s been tried before. A couple of years ago, for instance, the Azure card came into use in the case of some asylum seekers. The “countless horror stories” touched upon in that CiF article – kids going without clothes, parents having to walk miles to a supermarket which might accept the card because they aren’t allowed to buy a bus pass – speak for themselves, as well as highlighting the incompetence of the government’s implementation of the scheme.

Or, if individual tales of embarrassment and degradation don’t move you, just look at the stats. A majority of card users were unable to attend essential health appointments, were turned away from supermarkets they’d been told would accept it, and found the experience of using the card humiliating and a source of anxiety. These aren’t just teething issues or a handful of isolated problems; this is the standard result when you take disenfranchised people and further remove their autonomy and dignity.

Government has amply and repeatedly proven its complete lack of ability to run such an operation in any morally justifiable manner. Yet it persists in keeping huge swathes of the public under the thumb, and going to great lengths to make sure nobody gets a damned penny more than they’re deemed worthy of, for the sake of meagre financial savings, while imposing a tragic and needless oppression on those who’ve already had the most opportunity stolen from them.

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2 Responses

From the description it sounds like the problems owe more to incompetent implementation than fundamental flaw.
Here we have the WiC program (Women, Infants, Children) which provides WiC checks/vouchers for specific items to help assure that the program members are getting proper nutrition. It pays for juice (100% juice, not juice-like drink), milk, eggs, that kind of thing. And it works fairy well mainly because WiC is accepted at just about every supermarket and a lot of convenience stores as well. That it is good for an item, rather than a set value, also helps.
Correct me if I am wrong, but the Azure card was replacing supermarket vouchers according to the Refugee Council report you linked to. Were supermarket vouchers usable for transportation costs? If not, how would switching from voucher to card affect that? Wouldn’t the problem exist with both?
The next 3, being unable to buy types of food in the specified supermarkets, the limited number of available places to shop, and the card not working even when it was supposed to/staff refusing the card, are all results of incompetent implementation and a lack of forethought in the initial planning stages. Not making sure that all major variations of dietary needs are covered by default and having a procedure for unusual needs in place, for example. That should have been considered and arranged before the project even got to the testing phase.
The final point, the feelings of anxiety and shame, that is the one that hits directly on your point of being dehumanizing, and that is a problem that good implementation can’t really fix. That requires change on a social level. Providing cash rather than a card or vouchers can lessen this, but until we get to the point where occasionally needing a helping hand isn’t seen as something to be ashamed of, it will be an ongoing problem.

To sum up, I agree that the Azure card seems to have been a train wreck, but I think that the utter failure of the implementation owns the lion’s share of the blame.

No, means tests are mean, and paternalistic assumptions are meaner. The punch line of the post sums it up. Opportunities have been stolen. The problem is definitely the concept, not the implementation.